Make a Wish
by aikakone
Summary: The Lovers' Well is poisoned, and it’s up to Umi, the Water Knight, to fix it. Cynical with no love of her own, she doesn’t know if she cares to help.


**MAKE A WISH**

"Mistress Umi! Mistress Umi!"

The blue-haired water knight heard the sounds of the young girl calling her, but she put her head back under the pillow. She hadn't been sleeping well recently, and sleep was a too-precious thing. When the calls became incessant, she gave up hope of trying to hide.

"What is it?" she asked with an edge of impatience in her voice.

"The people need your help," the girl said while bowing low before her. "Down in the courtyard, an emissary is here to speak to you."

"People always need help from the Knights," she grumbled while dressing.

Umi wasn't sure what had put her into such an irritable mood lately. She did not resent being a Knight or helping people as they needed it. It was both a responsibility and a privilege to be a Magic Knight.

As she passed the closed doors while walking down the hallway of the castle, she heard sounds of lovers behind them. Caldina and Lafarga were such an unexpected pair, but they fit each other. Fuu and Ferio were made for each other. Umi had never seen one person more devoted to the other. In different chambers were Lantis, Hikaru and Eagle. For this, she did not ask. Still in another place, the pseudo-Presea pined for the love of Clef, but the Mage never threw her the scraps of his love, the Water Knight noted.

Almost out of the building, Umi passed by Ascot, the dear boy who loved her. He grew up for her. How she wished someone else would grow up for her, because it was not this monster-loving boy-man who had her heart. She _wanted_ to love him, but she didn't. She tried to make herself, but her heart didn't seem to work that way.

"Umi," Ascot said, his face instantly lighting as he beheld her, "I would have sent my friends, but only you could do this."

"What is it?" she asked again, wondering why no one told her what was so important.

"Great Water Knight," an auburn-haired man said with a courtly genuflect. "The Lovers' Well in our village has been poisoned. We need you and your water power to save it before all is lost."

Nodding at the mission, Umi pointed out, "There are other sources of water."

The man's face paled. "Yes, if it were only water, then this would not seem so important, but this is the Lovers' Well."

_Well, that explains it,_ Umi thought to herself sarcastically. It didn't explain anything to her at all, of course, because it was another piece of Cephiro that she had yet to learn.

Ascot volunteered the information for her. "If the well stays poisoned, the love of the people will slowly sour and disintegrate." He looked at her with a hopeful expression. "The Water Knight could save the well and the love of the people, especially if she has love in her own heart."

She blanched. Why not ask Hikaru for this? _She_ was the one who had two men for lovers, so surely there was an overabundance of love there. Meanwhile, Umi herself had love from someone that she did not return, and for all the love she had for another, he did not return it to her. It was a chain that went nowhere.

"I don't think I can do this," she said shakily to Ascot only. It was rarely that Umi admitted fear.

"You can," the voice of another imparted.

Umi stiffened at the sound of his voice, and turned to where she knew the lavender-haired Master Mage would be standing. She was not surprised to see Clef there in the visage of a boy who appeared no older than Ascot in his younger form.

"Clef," she said softly, bowing her own head at him.

The mage ignored her greeting and spoke to Ascot. "Stay here with the people. Use your friends to watch guard if you must. I will go with Umi to solve this problem."

"Yes, sir!" he said to the mage. To Umi, he said, "Please, return safely."

"How hard can it be?" Umi disguised with a laugh. She could only wonder at it if Clef felt the need to accompany her.

Clef curtly nodded to Ascot and then walked away to the direction of the well, Umi presumed. She jogged to catch up with him. She pondered her mission and how she would purify the well. For that matter, she wondered with a niggling sense of dread, how had the well been poisoned in the first place?

-&-

Mage Clef preferred silence. He might look child-like, but Umi secretly dubbed him an old cranky pants. She liked shaking up his world. Most of the time, this is. Lately she avoided him.

Normally, she would have been chattering to try to get him to speak and break out of his shell. This time she didn't try. It hadn't worked before, and it was never going to work. At least, that was her cynical estimation of the situation.

Umi was lost in her own depressed thoughts when she heard his voice. "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," she evaded.

"In the land of Cephiro," he began in his teacher mode, "thoughts can become reality. You _are_ thinking something, Umi. What is it?"

"Why should I care if this well is poisoned? Love? Love is useless!" she said angrily.

"Do you think so?" he questioned.

"I know it is when love can keep Princess Emeraude and Zagato apart. They did love each other," Umi said, reminding Clef of the event that eventually led to her becoming a Magic Knight.

He shook his head sadly at the tragic romance. "That is changed now. Hikaru broke the pillar system with her love."

"Yes, she did," Umi agreed, biting back any more disparaging remarks she might want to say.

-&-

The walk to the well was tedious because it involved a climb up a small foothill in the mountains. To the people that regularly went there, the view was supposed to be quite romantic. Lovers often had picnics there and went generally to get away from the rest of the world and bask in the glow that love affords.

When they arrived at the well, Umi noted that it was inaccurately named. It was actually a circular stone fountain fed by a deep water source. Instead of running clear, the water within the well was murky and dark, signifying the poison at its heart.

"How do we fix it?" she asked, trying to be business-like about it.

"There is a deep hurt for the well's waters to have turned black," Clef said. "As it is fed from deep within Cephiro, there is a mystery of the pain."

"Love _is_ pain," Umi said softly.

Clef looked at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, but he did not speak.

"What do people do here?" she asked.

"Normally, they seek the face of their one, true love in the waters," the mage said. "For those who have love, they gaze together and see futures."

"And it's broken," Umi said acerbically. At his slight nod, she laughed. "Of course, it is."

When she might want to look into the waters to see her one, true love, she could not, not even when the mage had traveled alone with her to help this mission. It was a cruelty of the highest form.

The tiny mage put his fingers in the black waters, causing ripples in the surface. He had a thinking look on his face while he concentrated on the problem at hand. "Umi, you control the waters. You must make this right. Perhaps, if you could look within and find that one true love, you could cleanse away the pollution."

"No, I can't do that," she said with a frightened look on her face.

"Why not?" he asked, removing his hand from the waters.

"I... I don't have any love to give," she said, and she hoped he believed her.

"I doubt that's true, Umi," Clef said while looking into her blue eyes. "But if you feel broken, then maybe that's why the well is poisoned."

"Are you saying I did this?" she demanded, replacing fear for anger. Anger was a shield she knew well about.

He walked with his staff to stand closer in front of her. "I am saying that all things in Cephiro are connected. If you, the Water Knight, feel hardness in your heart, and the Lovers' Well has become poisoned, surely there is some connection."

_Surely there was_, she thought. She didn't want a connection or to be part of the cause. She wanted to hide from her pain and not face it here.

"Umi," Clef said to her in a pleading tone she had not before heard him use, "love and hate make a sharp two-edged sword because they are not far apart. Don't let the love I know you have in your heart turn to hate."

"You know nothing of the love I have in my heart," she said as she stared defiantly at him.

"Look into the well. Help me learn," said the mage.

Umi agreed because she would rather look there than to continue to look at him, the source of her anguish.

She sat down beside the well, putting her arms up on the low stone sides and looked inside. The waters were deepest black. It reflected specks of light, but it did not react the way healthy waters did. As Umi put her own hands into the water, she was afraid that she had actually caused this. In guilt and shame, she started to weep silent tears.

She would not cry out loud. It was not Umi's way to show her weakness. She would complain openly, but suffer in semi-silence. It wasn't the same kind of silence that Hikaru used when she hid the truth of Nova, but it was a silence of her own.

Clef would not tell her, but the tears falling down her face were as black as the ones in the stone fountain. Silently he put his hand on her shoulder.

"Please, don't," Umi asked.

He did not remove his hand from her. Instead, he requested that she look into the water and tell him what she saw. "Even with poison at the source, there is much we can learn from the images you see."

"I see only black," she said bleakly. Then, looking closer, Umi thought she could actually see real images. They were shady, but they were there--her parents, classmates, friends that she had made in Cephiro. Ascot came to the still dark surface more clear than others.

Umi gasped in quiet surprise at his image, and swirled her hands to him. He had done so much for her and given his love so freely. "I _wanted_ to love him," she said as more tears rained from her eyes.

"But you don't," Clef stated.

"No, I don't," Umi wept. She continued to cry for many reasons. Partly she felt guilty for not loving Ascot as he loved her. He deserved love as all people did, but she didn't have any of hers to give to him. "He deserves better," she declared.

Clef nodded, though she could not see him. "Someday he may find it," he said.

"How will I know when we're done? I don't want to keep looking," the Water Knight said.

"Please try," he requested, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "When your heart is clean, I feel the waters will be clean as well."

"Do you know this for a fact?" she asked with a sniff.

"No," Clef said and closed his eyes. "I only have hope."

"So now what?" Umi asked, as she looked into the waters. She did notice that they were less black than they were before. It hurt to confront her pain, but if she finally did it, the pain would end.

"Look inside the water until you see the face of your one, true love. Follow the legend."

"I have no one, true love," she said defensively, whipping her head around to look at him.

"I cannot believe that to be true," he said with a measure of shock on his face. "Who do you love? Who loves you?" he asked with a voice so soft she might not have heard it if she hadn't been focusing on him.

"No one loves me," she said, hiding her face from him. "The one I love does not feel the same way for me. Is it justice because I could not love Ascot?"

"No," he said again his voice a whisper on the wind. "Please look, Umi."

She did look into the pool, and Clef's image appeared. He was so incongruous to be a centuries-old mage veiled as a child. His magic was immense and his strength of character even greater. Of course he irritated her under the best of circumstances, but beyond all that petty and shallow surface, she had the greatest esteem for him.

That was why she was so sorry when Sierra had confessed her love of Clef to her. Sierra was one of Cephiro's own. She belonged with him, not Umi, even if she was the Water Knight.

"I know who I love," she finally said. "I think he is wonderful, but I have no hope that he could love me. He thinks me frivolous and foolish. We are so different from each other."

"Sometimes it is the differences that unite people," he said as he stepped back away from her. While his words indicated joining, his action was saved for something else. He tapped his staff and the whole of it glowed with power.

"Ascot changed for me, you know," Umi said. "I didn't ask him, and the act humbled me. It humbled me," she repeated looking down into the water. It _was_ becoming clearer.

"The one I love... I am not so important to him as that," she said and cried a little more into the well.

He tapped the ground again decisively and said, "Don't be so sure."

Behind Umi Clef became the one thing she had not yet seen. He was a man, no longer hiding as a boy. It was the same Clef, from the tips of his toes to every lavender hair on his head.

"Who do you see?" he asked her.

Umi sighed, resigned to the fact that she might as well tell him. For better or worse, this could finally end. "I see you, Clef."

"Do you?"

Looking closer to the water, she nodded. "I see you."

The odd thing was that when she looked at the water this time, she did see him, but not as she knew him. He was no longer a boy in robes much too big for him. Clef was there as a man with strong, long bones and an intense look in his eyes. Umi reached to touch the image, but her hand splashed through the clear surface of the water.

"Oh," she said in surprise, not sure which to attend first--the clear water or the image of the mage.

"The water is clear," she said, turning slowly to him.

"But it is not perfect yet," Clef said standing away from her.

Umi looked at him in shock, seeing the same Clef she'd beheld in the waters.

"I do love you, Umi," he said, sounding almost apologetic. "Please, don't hurt for me again."

She shook her head in disbelief. She should be shouting for joy, but she didn't want to trust that it was real.

"I wanted you to see me like this at least once. I don't promise to stay changed for you as Ascot has. I am an old man, and I am very set in my ways." Clef smiled to her with a blush that was surprising on a person so old.

"I had to let you know that you _are_ loved, even if what I have to give you isn't all that you deserve." Clef nodded at her, thinking for all their sakes that she should have fallen for Ascot, but glad that she loved him instead. "If anyone can shake me up in this life," he admitted, "it's you. You come in breaking the peace I work so hard to create, and I am fascinated by it."

"What now?" Umi asked fearfully. Yes, she had long wanted his love, but having it was more of a shock to her than the desire for it.

"We go back to the castle. We live," the mage said as he stepped before her, for the first time looking down into her face.

As he stared at her, her lips parted in silent supplication. He bent his head to hers and placed his lips to give her a chaste kiss that she savored. At the same time as their kiss, the mage tapped his staff on the ground causing a light to glow around them.

When Umi opened her eyes, she could still feel him on her lips, but he was not there. With his magic, he had transported them back to the castle. Umi stood in her room alone, but not unloved.

**FIN**


End file.
